Although current occupants of Kremlin were responsible for top appointments at Roskosmos, as well as for creating a system, where they would hear only what they wanted to hear, the Russian government appeared to be heading along its usual route of finding scapegoats. In the absence of a real political opposition or viable independent media, the entrenched political system had little incentive for fixing itself. Instead, the Russian government preferred to escalate the climate of fear in the industry, which had already been struggling to attract young engineering and scientific talent. In a nationally televised speech on November 26, the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev found it appropriate to remind Roskosmos employees about mass executions of the Stalin era: "The latest failures are hitting hard at our competitiveness. This does not mean that anything fatal happened. It just means that we have to do a detailed flight assessment and punish those responsible," Medvedev said, "I am not proposing to line people up against the wall like it was with Iosif Vissarionovich (Stalin in power)."

With his trivialization of Stalin's crimes in a pre-election political theater, Medvedev played a dangerous game of appeasing those who saw the unspeakable terror of the Soviet past as a viable future for Russia, even if it would mean a certain torture and death of countless friends and family members, a life in mortal fear, with a survival often depending on the betrayal of others and on the applauding a paranoid dictator. In the 1930s, Stalin's henchmen nearly decimated the nascent Soviet rocket development program, along with the rest of the Soviet society. Leaders of the Rocket Research Institute, RNII, were murdered and the organization's leading engineers, Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, lost years of their lives in prisons.

In the meantime, according to sources within the industry, the latest round of purges at Roskosmos was expected to start as soon as Monday, November 28.